#804: Bitcoin Is Cheap And Nobody Believes It with Matthew Mežinskis

0:00 You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

0:28 I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Matty, good afternoon. Marty, good to be here, my friend. As your longest running guest, most anti-commy, anti-Nazi guest, I'm always glad to be back on. It's always great to have you on, sir. Wild times we're living in.

0:52 Wild times. You're just saying I need to get off Twitter. I have been saying that, yeah, for a few years now myself. I find if I go to conferences and really need to link with people via Twitter DMs, then put it back on. But a few years now, I had it off the phone. I don't know. How are you feeling? You in the doom spiral?

1:17 No, I mean, we got midterms here next week. and so I think the algos are being turned up to stoke fear to get people to vote one way or another. So, I was just observing that. Then the AI stuff is pretty crazy, what's going on. It is. But you guys are in the golden age, right? The golden age of America.

1:43 Oh yeah, baby. All systems go. There's nothing to complain about, my friend. We're good. we got we got everyone and their mother building data centers locking down power deals they're handing out star links like candy over here you're you're led by the doctor you have a fearless leader in the doctor you remember the doc you remember the doctor don't you don't you remember don't you remember this tweet came out. It was a very, very controversial tweet with the evangelical right by your fearless leader. And he said, this is not a picture of Jesus. This is a picture of a doctor. Oh, yes. Yes. You're led by the doctor. I forgot about that. It was the other crazy thing about Twitter. It's like a 24-hour news cycle. That thing is... Six months is already way deep

2:42 of the recesses. I had to go deep in the mental random access memory of my brain to pull that one out. Well, this is the beauty of not getting on Twitter much is you just barely see this nonsense. Yeah. But to each their own. Ignorance is bliss, I guess. I mean, over the weekend, I don't know if you saw it, but he was prating around Nicki Minaj saying, look at her ass.

3:05 I did not. And this is true. This is a true thing that's happened here. All right. Well, excellent. I'll do a little search for that. Yeah. Can't wait. Yeah. The Bitcoin price sitting at a boob price right now, $80,080. Bubo. Yeah, it's all been quiet on the Western front of Bitcoin. I feel like we're in a consolidation period for the last couple months.

3:33 Yeah. But generally, I'd say still pretty positive from that August bump. I was much more bearish in the summer and happy to be proven wrong on that, that bump that we got in August and so far holding. And, you know, I would be highly, highly doubtful if we go back to, you know, 60,000, even 70,000 levels, maybe for a quick, quick minute.

4:02 But yeah, you know, I checked this stuff out and we're looking at it most days. I mean, we do this every three months. Yes, we do. And we've been doing this for seven, eight years now almost. Yeah, it's going to be eight. eight it's gonna be like about to be nine years actually next next year and uh and i i know we've both been hanging around the rim of the corn for for quite some time now 13 going on 14 years which is hard to believe but uh i tweeted this out uh like a month ago the dislocation between market structure it's the price of bitcoin and i know like looking at your charts power law trend like it it is or power trend line is it was near like historic lows but it felt like the bear market wasn as severe as bear markets passed from from a price perspective but the dislocation between what i would call like market structure like pretty shallow bear market and

5:20 short bear market and the sentiment is larger than i've ever seen it the sentiment is very reminiscent to the summer of 2015 to me these days and the price is hovering around eighty thousand dollars which is, I don't know, there's a disconnect between price and sentiment right now, I think. Yeah, yeah, I think that you're right.

5:44 If you back it up, though, and take a look at the numbers, we're definitely in cheap territory. In fact, the same thing as those 2015 lows or 2018 lows or 2022 lows. but I still remain pretty confident. I mean, we do this every time. It rebounds every time. And I say it often in my streams, especially when we get to these levels.

6:16 And when we're around $17,000 at the end of 2022, all the FTX debacle was in full swing and Peter Zion, the geopolitical genius, was on Joe Rogan saying Bitcoin was $17,000 overvalued at $16,000. Those are moments to remember because often people spout off about Bitcoin without knowing anything about it.

6:44 Even if they may be somewhat learned in other spheres, I'm not saying he's not learned in certain things, it's important to remember because cycles do repeat. And we are in the exact same scenario percentage-wise, percentile wise now as we were in those periods. So yeah, you tweeted out on Friday, Bitcoin says it's the 8.4 fourth percentile in 17 year power trend.

7:13 Gold at the 93 and a half. So we've got this gold still hovering up there. Yeah. Yeah, so we can look at these. I don't know if you want. Yeah, that's a lot. Usually, dear listener, when we do these, it's a little bit better on the YouTube streams. When you launch on Spotify, do you have the live videos going as well?

7:39 I think you do, right? If you do on Apple now, Spotify's been a little finicky with Fountain. Fountain is trying to communicate with the Spotify team. We have video all over the place. But you can watch the video on Apple or Fountain. You're listening on Spotify right now. Okay. so again just brass tacks being in the uh trying to get the macro trend and not get too worked up the nice rainbow looking log linear trend bitcoin with a power trend 96 r squared you go log log get a nice straight line beautiful trend uh here's here's the peter zion moment right here end of 2022, 16 and change.

8:31 And you see here, we actually went lower and set really like an all-time low here in June when that was $60,000 Bitcoin for the time, for the relative time of Bitcoin relative to the power trend. And so now, yeah, we're even lower than that tweet that I did last week. So we're about, I can never see.

8:58 We're about, we're around 80,000, whatever. It's a little bit below 8%, the eighth percentile. So again, that means 92% of the time of all observations that we've had in the Bitcoin world, you know, the price has been higher relative to trend. So I'm pretty bullish. I'm not saying that we couldn't go down to the fifth percentile.

9:26 And in fact, I do think we could see some weakness here, especially if, you know, Elizabeth Warren gets on her by horse after a blue wave or whatever might happen here in the midterms. You know, trying to target corruption in crypto or whatever from the Trump admin. There could be narratives to bring the price even weaker.

9:45 but generally speaking, I would say, you know, not financial advice, but this is, this remains a relatively cheap price point for Bitcoin. Yeah. What's been going on with gold and the Bitcoin to gold ratio? Right. So let's look at gold first. Let me just pull it up here just a quick second. So with gold I call this one pretty accurately Gold trend is much less explosive in fact than Bitcoin It been on a hell of a tear the last three four years no doubt But if you look at the gold price here just straight up gold price, and you go over a long, long macro trend. All right. This is a linear scale. All right, linear. And then if we go log linear, get that straight line, and that's an expo trend. So gold, just like stocks, bonds, you know, I've said it a thousand

10:48 times exponential trends. The only thing that will give you that rainbow on linear, sorry, log linear scale is Bitcoin. The only financial asset, in fact, that I have observed to be doing that, which is pretty wild. But if we do gold, you can start to see these bands of what extreme overvaluation or undervaluation looks like. So we can see in 1980, right? January for about two seconds, got to 850 bucks an ounce. Then it nadir in, I believe it was July of, actually, I think it was 1999, but also from 1999 to 2001, basically it was scraping the bottom around $250.

11:34 And then I told everybody a lot of caution this winter when it was going over $5,000 an ounce because it was just pushing this 100th percentile. If you just look at that, that's a 55-year trend to new highs, and it set a new high, and so we're off that. We may have a little bit more of a dead cat bounce or something, but I don't see this going anywhere to fantastic Jim Rickards, $50,000 an ounce of territory.

12:06 Again, anything could happen, but the probabilities of supply and demand suggest something different. And if you look at the CAGR of this trend, all right, it's only 5.7%, which is pretty wild, right? That's since 1969, 5.7%. So yeah, we're coming off of it. You know, I could, I could, I could project this forward, like let's go even out to the year 2050.

12:37 And if you look at the OLS there, the first line, the price projected in 2050 for gold on this trend is $8,500. So nice, good, but keep in mind, we were at $5,000 already in February. And yeah, in February. And there's much more data inside these trends than there is for the Bitcoin. power law model, which only has, you know, as you know, 17 years worth of data, less pricing data.

13:12 So I'm pretty confident to be bullish on Bitcoin compared to gold. And it's fine. I got no problem with gold if you want to hold gold. But as we see, Peter Schiff has been wrong and wrong again. And yeah, that's kind of the update there. I can do Bitcoin in terms of gold now. Might be helpful. I think that's where the signal is.

13:31 Yeah. Bitcoin price and other commodities. Right. So here we got Bitcoin dollar, we got gold dollar, now we'll go Bitcoin gold. All right. So this is interesting. First thing to notice is its power curve. Okay. We go log, log, a straight line. All right. So the Bitcoin price in terms of gold that the power regression dominates here, like it's not an exponential trend, which again shows us that something's going on more in Bitcoin land than it is in the world of gold.

14:07 but what is interesting here is because of gold's massive uh success relative to its history in the last three four years you see this like you know bitcoin had a major low right in the winter and the summer in terms of gold i'll zoom in here but you can see like where usually we have these gaps is between the you know the 90th 100th percentile right here we had a huge gap between the bottom and the 10th percentile, which is fine.

14:38 But I think it just shows people that you can have these probabilities on both ends of the spectrum, depending on what your lens is, depending on what your frame of reference is. And so here, and I said this at the time, again, I try to not be too arrogant with these calls, but I was pretty confident with this one that this trend was just way too strong for Bitcoin.

15:02 I saw it bounce from the 12 ounces of gold. I said, I think 10 ounces of gold is out of play. And there we go. So think about this. If you were a gold holder back in February, March, you could have got Bitcoin for 12, 13 ounces of gold. We could have gotten one Bitcoin. Now, just waiting eight months, it's going to take you 20 ounces of gold to buy Bitcoin.

15:26 So it might not seem like in the last eight months Bitcoin has done that great right Even though it has had a great recovery especially from August as I mentioned which does surprise me Look at that change right It almost the price has almost doubled in terms of gold, which shows you Bitcoin is on a way stronger trend line than gold is and quite unique, quite good. Again, we could retest again so that it's growing all the time. So the The lower trend now is 15 ounces of gold, right?

16:00 I think we still could test it in the fourth quarter. You never know. But I do think 10 ounces of gold might be... I do think 10 ounces of gold is out of play. I mean, forever. Barring like a massive black swan. You just look at this chart. Look at the probabilities. Look at the way the trend line grows.

16:18 It's pretty incredible. And the trailing 12 of this trend, by the way, is 36.7%. So actually a little bit shallower. The Bitcoin dollar trading 12-month trend is a little under 40%. So gold takes a little bit of that return away. But still, you can see that the name of the game here, it's Bitcoin's power curve way more defines what's happening in Bitcoin world than, like you said, sentiment or money supply even.

16:55 I know this is another quarterly update here with the base money, so I can show you that. I think this is the main thing. We've been doing this long enough, right? I don't know how long I've been talking to you about the power trend for, but I've been tracking this long enough. This is the main story for Bitcoin and how it's growing.

17:11 And I think it's way more descriptive of what Bitcoin is doing. And it should give people a lot of calm presence. take that frame of reference and try to expand that to other areas of your life. Touch grass, see how good Bitcoin does relative to these other assets, and hopefully it will give you some peace.

17:32 Yeah. I think Bitcoiners need to do better. I'm sure you saw the headlines of the fusion reactor turning mercury into gold. And every Bitcoiner and their mother running out and saying, Oh, Peter Schiff, we can use alchemy to turn mercury into gold now. Yeah, it's not the first time that such news has broken.

17:54 But yeah. Well, it's like that. If you look at it, I think mercury is something like $14,000 a gram to do something like that at scale. And then if you do successfully use a fusion reactor to turn mercury into gold, you have to bury it underground for like 20 years to let all the nuclear waste dissipate from.

18:19 from the asset. But the point of being is, it's like you just look at the, you don't need to discover alchemy to shit on the gold bugs. Just look at this trend. Correct, correct. And it's still not the first instance, I think in history where someone has demonstrated in a lab where it's possible to create gold.

18:40 It's been demonstrated years before, as far as I know. so yeah so that's it yeah I mean let's go into base money now because I am interested with everything going yeah so well one more here on the I had these quarterly candles now just a simple one I think these are actually helpful if you look at the down trends right in prior cycles to 2015 as you mentioned was a real long one 2018 2019 relatively shorter although we did have that fall in 2019 again, 2022. But bottom line is, I think if you just gloss over these trends, of all the cycles down, it's at least four red candles. And we've had three full red from 2025.

19:32 So 2025, fourth quarter was red. First two quarters this year were red and green. And now we're actually currently in a red. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if we have a red quarter here. I think this is, again, just to warn people like, yeah, you can always be mega bullish. Great. But probabilities, I wouldn't be surprised at all if this quarter is red or first quarter next year is red.

19:54 Just something to keep in mind. Okay, so that's quarterly. Let me show you this one. This one I think is really insightful. So again, this is the old monetary base update. It's a little bit slower. And I used to because I got some broad money stuff in here as well, which we can talk about. But base money is basically central bank money.

20:18 It's the printing press. It's what actually central banks print to primarily buy government bonds, but they also have some gold on their balance sheets. And these are the top five in the world. So the Chinese yuan is actually in first whole place right now at $6 trillion. Then we got the dollar itself, $5.5 trillion.

20:41 the euro, 4.6 trillion, and the poor yen, as you have surely been following the story of the yen last few months. It's just getting crushed in dollar terms. So the yen was actually winning. You might remember some quarters we did, right? Like five, six years ago, the yen was on top pole position. And now it's just a distant fourth falling to about under three and a half trillion, then Bitcoin, and then the British pound sterling, which is about a trillion dollars in base money. So we were actually close to catching it in the quarter end. And this is only from second quarter, but you can see I got, of course, the market cap I keep growing.

21:25 So we can get Bitcoin. We bounced off it close when we were down to about $1.2 trillion there at the end of second quarter. Now we're well back up. So this is it. This is really, if you want to look at Bitcoin versus the fiat world, this is how it's growing and this is how it's going to continue to grow.

21:43 and uh i think it's an interesting just an interesting alignment there of the top five current season in bitcoin yeah i mean just looking eye testing caveman ta this chart looks like my favorite yen uh yen euro pound going opposite of the yuan the dollar and in Bitcoin, it looks like. Yep. Yep. And I'm not sure how much the yuan will continue there.

22:15 That's interesting. I mean, sometimes the news cycle might be overhyped on some of these technical things, but you read the tea leaves, the Chinese seem to be worried about their debt. They're the largest. Of course, the US always. It's a debt story, right? But the Chinese, even though they have a huge manufacturing base, they have the fastest growing debt. They have the largest debt of all developing countries and the second largest debt holding country in the world, basically. So it comes with economic growth, it's true. I'm not defending any of it.

22:49 But that might face some headwinds as well. And again, all this stuff about the BRICS currencies or the yuan being like some sort of a new safe haven, I just don't see that at all. I think we agree it's going to be Bitcoin before it's going to be Chinese yuan. Yeah, and I think that's, I mean, bringing the debt into focus here.

23:12 Big point of contention here in the United States, especially considering where yields have drifted to. Obviously, they've come off their highs in the last couple of weeks. But big point of contention here, which is like how high can we let these yields go as we're rolling over all this debt? And you have the Genius Act rules being set last week and this over-indexing on the front end of the yield curve by the Treasury with Scott Bessent at the helm.

23:47 And that's been a very consistent topic of conversation on this show over the last six to eight months is what's going on with the yields and what's going on with the Treasury. I mean, the theories out there, they're trying to push everything to the front end and imbue the financial system with stable coin rails to drive demand even further for that and sort of do like a hot swap of this long-ended, long-duration debt with short-duration debt and try to drive the flows towards those short-term bond auctions with stable coin demand.

24:30 And that's, I'm interested to get your thoughts on the whole stablecoin conversation and the push to integrate it very, very broadly in our financial system. Yeah. Well, it's a longer term thing. First of all, I would say, I think it's much larger sort of, I don't know, what's the word, like sort of clickbait sort of a topic, right? Because the stablecoin market cap still.

25:00 that even 200 billion, I have it somewhere, but 100 and some billion. And you're checking me right now. Yeah, I'm checking. We got Tether at 182 billion. Okay. So it's rising faster than I. USDC. So it's like, yeah, 250 billion between USDC and Tether. Yeah. So $250 billion. But then if you look at what M3 money represents, which is basically money that is most analogous to a stablecoin.

25:42 So M3 money is repurchase agreements, euro dollars, which I don't have. But I do have everything else part of the M3 stack, which is the broadest money. It the most liquid non non deposits So money market funds repurchase agreements those types of assets We get your to trillion in size just dollars And that doesn even count Euro dollars, which are offshore dollars, which are also analogous in some way to stablecoins, right? Because stablecoins are basically an offshore money market fund.

26:21 so and no one has a good handle as far as i can tell on what the true i'm trying to still get a good proxy for for euro dollars but don't have it but anyway i have all the others and if you factor even all the other m3 type instruments for other currencies right uh on top of the the more narrow deposits like demand deposits so on and so forth i mean total m3 globally worldwide is about 150 trillion. I have a chart for this, but 150 trillion. So here I look at these again, it's kind of clickbaity. And yeah, it might drive some news stories. It might drive something there, but it's really, really small at the moment. What I do think is a bigger question mark back to your original question about yields is how high can the market go on this,

27:16 particularly in the long bonds because as everybody knows, the more that resets higher, the harder it is for people to pay off a lot of that underlying debt. And I just don't know the levels here. I can show you looking at the short. All right, here's Fed balance sheet. I had this pulled back like 30 years 35 years you see so you see the craziness right QE123 from post GFC then you see the pandemic high what I do think is interesting is remember this the old repo seizure which is a short-term seizing of the market.

28:12 That happened in September of 2019. The result of that was they had to raise asset purchases. They're doing that again, and they have been here from the end of last year, as Powell did what he said he was going to do, but usually they always overshoot it. So this is, I would say, eerily similar to 2019.

28:34 It's just like, are we going to get that shot or shock of a black swan, which would give them the excuse to monetize, give them the excuse to lower interest rates? Like that might even be preferable to them. But if they do not have that, then that seems like it's going to be pretty difficult for debtors to pay their creditors.

29:01 It doesn't look good either way. Bitcoin looks fine either way. But yeah, this is where I mostly take my analysis to the extent of it because I just don't, you know, it's hard to say. But it's absolutely, we know that if they do have that shock, if they do have that black swan, we know what's going to happen to the money supply and to rates.

29:27 Yeah. It's interesting here. It's the one difference between now and Q4, end of Q3, Q4 2019 is we're raising rates and it's still going up. Yeah, correct. Correct. That is a difference. It's almost like it's actually the opposite situation because here they were just the standard targeting lower rates.

29:51 Rates were going down and they were purchasing more, printing money. And here they're actually able to do the opposite. and how long that can go. You know, people think what as a Fed meeting coming up this week now, and people think that that's might stay the same, might be a hike at the next meeting in December.

30:12 So it is diverging from the 2019 story. But yeah, overall, like that sort of trying to normalize the balance sheet, right? Which happened from 2014 to 2019. And then even pre-crisis or pre-pandemic, we had this exploding of balance sheet again, which showed that not all was well. And they're doing that again here.

30:39 Even though I think they're aware of it, that's why they're trying to keep the rates higher. But as you said, the economy is complex. And the more that these central bureaucrats try to get involved with it, they're usually not on the mark. We're doing a lot all at once right now. trying to re-industrialize, obviously, tariffs.

31:01 We talked about the AI trade, whatever you want to call it, build out seems to be somewhat existential to the quality of economic growth moving forward And as we talking Anthropic has released their S1 to go public next week And just reading the tea leaves here, doesn't seem too confident. The market doesn't seem too confident in what they released this morning.

31:34 Right. Right. That's been the big question is like, can any of these companies get public? And if not, what message does that send the market? And there's obviously hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars even locked up in this trade, for lack of a better term. Yeah. Is that, to your point, is the 2019-2020 equivalent of the COVID scare this time around?

32:06 Is it like a bailout of this infrastructure build out if it begins to puke? Yeah. In 2019, at least, I know people tried to read the tea leaves on, I think, the yield curve inverted even in August of 2019. And there were rumors, I guess, if you really look back about what was happening in China in 2019.

32:26 but really the market didn't even know at that time. So like, I don't think that was really a story until, you know, January, 2020. This point is, yes, I agree with you. Yes, it's very incestuous the way the capital market's reading AI right now. And yet, even though Bitcoin is not a stock, you can see it on my website, top money.

32:54 uh, work outblows.io slash top money. We're still trading, you know, 1.6, 1.7 trillion, whatever it might be is still a top 10 stock, even though Anthropoc will probably push us down a peg. Uh, so it's, there's, yes, there's a lot of incestuous liquidity chasing AI. There's a lot of question marks there.

33:20 You brought up data centers, all those things, but Bitcoin to me, It just seems like such a solid play right now, especially when you consider all those other factors. But quantum and AI breaking ECDSA, it's here. We're screwed. It's going to zero. Yes. Yes. If I had a nickel, if I had a sat for every time I heard quantum over all the years that I've been in Bitcoin.

33:48 But this time it's real. AI is here. This time it's different. It's really smart. Yeah. Well, we've seen how AI has been able to penetrate certain people's stash. For sure, there's a hardening going on. I mean, yeah, we haven't spoken. I don't think we've been on the show since Cold Card and all these vulnerabilities have been identified and exploited by people leveraging these AI tools.

34:26 Do you think it's a hardening that's been going on the last three months? Do you think we're out of the woods? I think it's definitely a hardening, yeah. I don't know if we're out of the woods, but you know, like what Kale and those guys have been doing trying to track his white hat actors in space. It's fantastic, I think.

34:44 there can only be there can be no other way right like it's not government regulation that's gonna save us here so if ai is exploiting people's stash and very sadly so um first of all there are ways there were plenty of ways to mitigate that you know again i'm not not definitely not happy for that situation. But the fact that I think new software releases can be so much clearer now in the way that they're implemented as far as checking for bugs and the bugs are out there and the potential attack services are out there. It's just, it's going to be this cat and mouse game, but I absolutely think that we're attacking this all in the right way as far as trying to protect people.

35:36 What's up, Freaks? This rip was brought to you by good friends at Square. Bitcoin at Block is creating a whole ecosystem of companies, Cash App, BitKey, and Square to make Bitcoin everyday money. The way Square does that is by enabling eligible businesses to accept Bitcoin over Lightning. This is a superior way to do payments compared to incumbent payment processors. And if you're a Square merchant that enables Bitcoin payments, if you're an eligible Square merchant that does that, you're going to have 0% processing fees through 2026. Another benefit, there's no chargeback. There's no chargebacks. Think about what that means. The card networks have been skimming every local business for decades, plus chargeback risk on top. Lightning settles in

36:10 seconds. Final for free. This is a Bitcoiners asking merchants for a favor and saying, hey, Bitcoin is a superior payment rail. If you adopt it, I have Bitcoin. You accept it. I will pay. You will save on those fees It a beautiful thing On top of that these merchants can take some of their fiat revenue convert it to Bitcoin automatically in the back end Square is trying to make Bitcoin everyday money for small medium and large size businesses So visit square.com slash go slash TFTC for up to two hundred dollars off eligible Square hardware.

36:38 Terms apply. This episode is sponsored by Bitcoin at Block. All right, freaks, you know, I don't take sponsor money from products I wouldn't use myself. So listen up. The Avon Bitcoin Visa card is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the Bitcoin lending space in a long time. Here's the deal. You can get a line of credit up to a million dollars backed by your Bitcoin without selling a single sat.

36:55 No games, no annual fees, no minimum draws. And your Bitcoin is custodied by Bitco, one of the most trusted names in digital asset security. AVEN never lends it out. There's no rehype application. You stay in control. You can lock in a fixed rate for up to 10 years. 10 years, that's 10 times longer than most lenders out there.

37:12 We go interest only for up to five years. rates start at 8.99% APR for a product that lets you keep your stack and still access liquidity. It's hard to beat. On top of this, that's what you also get 2% unlimited cash back every time you use the card. Spend fiat, keep your Bitcoin. That's the whole game. If you've been stacking for years and need liquidity without triggering a taxable event, this is worth a serious look.

37:34 Go to aven.com slash Bitcoin. That's A-V-E-N.com slash Bitcoin. Check it out. it's scary it's unnerving and that's the other thing that's why i love talking to you and i say this every time you're on but just like looking at the charts to detach yourself from the narratives of the day is extremely important and i'm not gonna lie it was very discombobulating end of july august september it's like what the hell's going on felt like every other day something was happening and i think uh one thing i've been telling people behind the scenes is it was never ever going to be easy. You're going to have these trials and tribulations on the road towards the Bitcoin standard.

38:18 These are just par for the course. You've got to go through these hardening experiences. I was definitely guilty of this in the past, but I think in recent years I've become more sober about Bitcoin's path to ultimate success. and it's arduous, not a straight line. And I think we're still learning how to interact with Bitcoin correctly.

38:49 We're still discovering what this alien technology is, how to interact with it, and what we can do with it, and how to secure it. And I think the conversations that have been had over the last three months about how we secure Bitcoin, how we audit the code, and what products are actually needed right now.

39:11 It's been a lot of hard conversations, but I think very important. And in the long run, we'll be a massive net positive, but you just have to realize we're in the middle of the storm. And you can't let the storm sort of dictate your view of Bitcoin in the long term. Yeah, and I mean, like anything, there's a wall of worry, right?

39:35 None of us know the future. We can do these charts with these probabilities to try to chart out the relative range of where we think the future could go. The more uncertainty that is posted or the more volatility that is posted on these charts, it's true, the range of probabilities widens right but at the same time you gain more confidence that those bands you know are relatively accurate um and that's why i was pretty confident in the in the winter where i said that gold was reaching uh you know top it's just doesn't matter what peter schiff or james records says they're on sort of their own odyssey that is outside the realm of reality but if you price Bitcoin in terms of gold, price Bitcoin in terms of dollars, price Bitcoin in terms of

40:27 oil or anything else, you're going to start to see this really interesting power trend, which suggests a really strong network effect, which I think is really exciting. And another one I could show you here in the same vein of the chart I just showed you. I got the different administrations up as well.

40:48 Bring it back to the... Yeah, well, not administrations, but this is actually... This is fully controlling the Congress. So the white spaces would be a mixed split Congress. And the non-white spaces would be when both parties control, or sorry, one party controls both houses. But, and again, I'm not defending it.

41:15 I'm not saying that I want it to happen. But if we do have a situation where, as we talked about, They have to explode the money supply, black swan, whatever it might be. They do have room to do it. Right? The last major high in the 70s here was when we were going into a petrodollar, going off the gold standard.

41:36 And as I've told you probably many times, if you don't remember, your listener, like the reason this goes down and looks better. So this is the Federal Reserve's proportion of the US federal debt. So this is literally how much they, this is the monetization of the debt. The phrase you've probably heard often. It doesn't monetize the debt.

41:54 They don't monetize the debt. Who says that? That was Bernanke's thing. We're not monetizing I mean, yeah, cue any sort of no-coiner there. But the reason this goes down and actually looks better, it goes down from 16%, 17% of owning the federal debt in the 70s is not because the Fed is printing any less money.

42:19 It's actually because the US has taken on more debt. So it shows sort of how this thing can go on for a long time. But anyway, if you zoom in here and then we look at QA123 and then again, the pandemic, you can see at the height in 2021, we're at 20% of federal debt. And this does not include agency securities, which are separate numerator, separate denominator.

42:47 But it's basically, it's just gross federal debt and how much the Fed owns of it, treasury securities. So now we're only at 11.3%. So if they need to act fast and swiftly and flexibly, use all those terms that economists like to do, I think that there's precedent that they can. They could go, they could double, the Fed could double its balance sheet and still be within the realm of historical possibilities.

43:18 So it's another reason. I'm not hoping for it, but I'm just saying they can do it, which is again another reason why it just shows that Bitcoin to be a much better holding than say the dollar or bonds. How do you think Warsh has been doing since he got stepped in, particularly on the KFOB side of things?

43:37 Fine. Fine. Yeah. I'm not a big judger or even train spotter on everything that they're saying in those meetings. But, you know, I, seems to be a little bit more independent than was maybe feared by some of the naysayers. I don't know you. Yeah, I think it's, I think he's definitely more independent.

44:03 I think he was handed a, I mean, if you're handed the reins, the federal reserve, I do not envy that position. No at all. No. And, uh, I do like no forward guidance. I think it's good to have the markets trying to figure out things for themselves instead of breeding the tea leaves. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it'd be better if we didn't have central banks at all, but we are where we are.

44:29 So it's also interesting if you look at this from basically the progressive era, really the end of the progressive era. But this is the start of the Great Depression all the way through almost to Newt Gingrich. It was a, you know, I didn't quite realize that. Right. But if you look at that, look at that Democrat stronghold on the House.

44:56 That's the House and the Senate being run by the Democrats. Pretty wild. Yeah. Or, you know, 60 some years. And yeah, but whether it's Republican, Democrat, whatever, unless you're Jacksonian ready to extinguish the debt. They both take the debt up. So it's just interesting that there was a long period of American history where it was only Democrat, Ron, House and Senate.

45:28 No, I think to your point, when you talk about the debt, I mean, this is on balance sheet debt. I think the topic of conversation around off balance sheet debt, particularly social security medicare medicaid historically a third rail don't touch but that third rails is weakening the the electric current blowing through that rails is weakening and people are beginning you're beginning to see bubbling of conversation around social security medicare medicaid cutting it and then i think interestingly in parallel you have the trump accounts being launched for children to start but then last week or the week before they're gonna they said they're gonna come out and make trump accounts available to anybody under 40. and so you can see the

46:19 beginnings of trends like hot swap social security out for this this trump account equity portfolio index portfolio for people um no discussion of bitcoin there though right with with the Trump accounts? No, no, no. I think you have to buy indexes. I'm pretty sure. Just pay and funds. Yeah, I mean, as John Williams used to say from ShadowStats, I mean, you could cut every single thing in the budget except for Social Security Medicare and Medicaid and you still be in deficit So that the brass tax math of the US federal budget You can cut the military.

46:59 You can cut literally every single thing except for those sacred cows and you'd still be in deficit. So we'll see. Again, I'm not again. I haven't said that this yet here. I think that there's a lot of difficult things going on in the world, right? You know, where I live, it's war right on our borders and stuff.

47:29 And I would just hope that at least in the free world, we can start to manage these problems like adults. I'm not sure if we can, but I would say that managing these problems like just head on, just telling people that, you know, I mean, I don't expect to get anything from social security that I've put in. Right. Yeah. Um, it's not going to be politically popular, but I have to at least start addressing it and maybe you can start to somehow fix the problem longterm. But I still would say, you know, the West is still way better than, you know, what's going on in Russia, for example. So I'm always balancing those things as well.

48:18 But we'll have to see. What's up, Freaks? This episode was brought to you by Simple Mining. I'm sure many of you listening to this right now own Bitcoin and own it the same way. You go into an exchange, you buy it, sweep it to the cold storage, maybe keep it on the exchange, and you pay full price. There's a smaller group of business owners, family offices, and investors with sharp CPAs that are quietly getting theirs a different way. They own the machines that make it. Here's how it works. You buy the miners at Simple Mining. Simple Mining hosts them, runs them at their facilities in Iowa on industrial power rates you can never get on your own. The Bitcoin they mine goes straight from your machine to your wallet. Two reasons I find this interesting right now.

48:51 The second one is the one that nobody's talking about. One is the economics. Cheap power. This lets you convert your electricity into Bitcoin at a discount spot. You're acquiring the asset below the sticker price everyone else pays. Two, and listen closely, if you've had a big income, you're making a lot of money out there. I know a lot of you freaks are making a lot of money. Miners are classified as computer equipment with a big, beautiful bill. Equipment means depreciation.

49:11 Qualifying buyers can write off the entire purchase in year one. It's the same playbook real estate investors have run for decades pointed at Bitcoin. Your CPA will want to see this before the end of the year. And with attractive financing available, you can deploy without selling assets to do it. This is not a garage operation. Simple Mining runs over 40,000 machines, which just ranked the fastest growing company in Iowa on the Inc. 5000 chart. They put together a valuable resource called the 2026 Bitcoin Mining Blueprint. It covers the five mistakes investors make when allocating to mining and how to avoid them before deploying capital.

49:40 You can access it for free at simplemining.io slash tftc. That's simplemining.io slash tftc. Freaks, look at me. I'm glowing. I've got like an angel's halo going around me. You know why that is? I feel good. I feel taken care of. I feel blessed, healthy, happy. And that is because I'm a CrowdHealth member. My family and I have been CrowdHealth members for five years now, literally this month. Five years ago, we joined CrowdHealth. We've had two babies. We've had multiple health events, and we're never going back to health insurance. CrowdHealth is crowdfunded healthcare. So you sign up for CrowdHealth, you pay a monthly fee, you help out with other people's bills, and it's significantly cheaper than health insurance. We were on COBRA as a family of three

50:21 when I left my last job before I went full-time to CFTC, went on the CrowdHealth. Now as a family of five, we pay, I believe, $700 a month. It's significantly cheaper. They're going to negotiate prices lower for you. They've consistently negotiated healthcare prices as much as 50, 60, 80%. In many cases, they help out with babies. If you have a pregnancy, you pay the first $3,000 and the crowd covers the rest. If you have a regular health event, you pay $500 and the crowd pays the rest. Go to joincrowdhealth.com. Sign up today. Use the code TFTC. Opt out of health insurance. I'm an insured baby and I love it. Use the code TFTC at joincrowdhealth.com and you'll get $99 a month for the first three months that you're on the CrowdHealth platform in the community.

51:06 Bitcoiners, you found sovereign money. Now find sovereign health and sovereign healthcare. I've been thinking about it a lot recently and obviously it's like one of the sacred books of the Bitcoin lore, but like the sovereign individual thesis is just getting stronger and stronger by the day, whether it's what we're talking about on the entitlement side, getting out of hand um i mean trump was not they didn't say trump's going to be president but they said some populist will will some populist outsider will emerge will run on immigration reform and um and tax reform and that's happened and and then like what you're seeing in your neck of the world world like asymmetric drone warfare was productive as well and that's like i've been

51:53 and following that trend on both sides of that battlefield. And it's insane. I don think people appreciate the gravity of the advancement of drone warfare It already affecting us man I mean, the Baltics, every country, and Romania, Poland, we've all been, our airspace has been penetrated by errant Russian drones.

52:21 and the, you know, imagine getting a text, you know, that there's an air raid alert and your child needs to go to the basement. Like, I don't know about you, but I grew up in the Midwest in the US and I know you did as well, but like we had tornadoes warnings and they never really happened where we were, but still had them.

52:45 The warnings, you had the drills, you had everything, but imagine, you know, you got to go in the basement, not for a tornado warning, not for a hurricane warning or anything, but a drone warning. Your child goes in the basement for that. I mean, we're already having it here. That's why we're so pressing for the free world to take on the average Russian health state.

53:06 But yeah, they're the two countries in the world right now that are taking this to the next level, is Russia and Ukraine and AI going to be a part of it. And it's a cost-effective way to scale both offense and defense. And that's what's happening. There's just no doubt about it. There's no getting away from it.

53:29 And it seems like we've crossed the event horizon too. Oh, yeah. There's no talking around this on a podcast. This is not happening. This is happening. And I don't think people in the West appreciate it unless you're terminally online. And it's, again, going back to the sovereign individual thesis, that's one of the things they predicted.

53:51 And it's, I can't imagine having to, like what you just described, having to worry about that. But I mean, I don't want to sound like too much of a doomer, but you'd be naive to think that this type of risk is not going to spread throughout the world. Yeah, no, I said it, I think, on the last show with you.

54:15 I've said a few times, like it's it's already happened to Americans on bases. You know, whatever you think about the Iran war, I wouldn't support any offensive wars of America, but they happened and they started that war. And I thought it was. Frankly, shameful, I mean, that the Iranian shot had drones.

54:35 It could have been Russian augmented drones. They didn't say specifically, but it was Iran and Russia. It's one and it's both sides of the same coin, the Shahid drone model. But that killed the first six Americans there in Kuwait in the bases. And America wasn't prepared for that. That's just that's a that's a war theater.

55:00 Right. But that's that's active war. And America wasn't even prepared for that. And then, of course, the Ukrainians come in with the thankless help that they always do and give anti-drone tech to the U.S. as they continued that and they're continuing to help. But, I mean, it's, you know, you saw Operation Spiderweb last year from Ukraine where they're able to knock out like a huge proportion of Russian bombers using covert drones hidden in, you know, in lorries and semi-trucks.

55:29 So there's no way that there's no way that this is not even that anyone credible in the U.S. Defense Department could not be thinking about this as a major threat that could happen even in the U.S. So it's for sure. I'm not I'm not trying to be a doomer, scare people. I'm just saying this is sadly the state that we're in right now.

55:51 And there's no way around it. You have to now be in a counter drone. State of mind. Well, especially in the U.S. because you have members of the Sinaloa cartel going to the front lines to learn how to use these drones. I mean, showing up as mercenaries, but really using it as like an education trip. It's it's not. It's not.

56:15 Yeah. That's my hope. A great hope. is that we're just being pushed to the precipice and we wake up one day and say, okay, this is getting too crazy. Let's focus on the good productive stuff. But how long that period lasts is yet to be determined. I mean, you have the Neil Howell acolyte saying we've got the fourth turning.

56:47 Probably we'll find a resolution to any of this until the 2030s after the turn of the next decade. but yeah i think it's uh it's gonna be crazy times yeah i mean monetarily uh we can stick on the military stuff for a second but monetarily that's what i'm seeing as well it's like big things with the way the bitcoin's growing the trends uh something that might be as large as the government monetary base about 100 trillion which might just be rounding to a number that wouldn mean anything But that stuff going to happen late 2030s where Bitcoin is going to be about as large as 100 trillion which is probably or could be 80 to 100 trillion could be the number where Bitcoin passes the growth rate of central bank money in the world.

57:36 That still just means it passes it. It might not mean banks are really holding it. Maybe they do. maybe they don't. Also, early 2030s will pass a million dollars per coin. This, again, just a round number. But I do think that late 2030s, from the monetary side, at least from what Bitcoin has the capability of doing, that shows something. But I fear much sooner than that.

57:56 I mean, Ukrainians right now are going to have to deal with probably the most brutal winter they've ever had. I don't know if you've been following. There's a lot of drama with Elon Musk. and Starlink in the Ukraine space. He's blaming Trump, and Trump's blaming him on who turned it off, but they turned it off.

58:18 They finally got back to full speed. And this is defense. This is not offense. They don't. The Ukrainians, if they go on offense into Russia with their homemade drones and ballistic missiles, which they're starting ballistic missiles now, by the way. But that has nothing to do with Star Shield. This is just defense of Ukrainian families and cities that are being bombed.

58:42 So that was throttled over a week ago. And no one is owning up to it in the government. But in any event, it doesn't matter. It's clear, I think, that you can't trust one dude with Starlink if you're Ukraine. So Europe knows that. Europe's building out their own. Russia, of course, has their own. China's going to have their own.

59:04 This is just what's going to happen. People are going to, you know, companies, governments, they're going to scale out this now sort of modern drone shield. And it seems very Orwellian apocalyptic, but also it's so much cheaper than the large scale stuff that that's just the way that it's going. There's just no way around it.

59:32 You have to defend against it. Like I can't imagine investing a trillion dollars in a Naples ship today, considering like the Houthis can just get one of these drones and hit a trillion dollar asset in the sea. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's incredible what Ukraine has been doing. And, you know, mine, the U.S. hasn't spent anything on Ukraine in two years.

59:58 And they're still fighting. They're still fighting, even gaining territory against the Russians. So they're doing, you know, God's work for us. on the eastern flank of Europe. But I do fear this political division will keep going. And if the hard right of France, say, wins next year, the French president, people don't maybe know, or maybe not know in the US, but the French president is probably one of the more powerful presidential offices in the world, based off of old Charles de Gaulle. It's a 10-year term, and potentially, I mean, it's five plus five. And they have a lot of powers. And if this Le Pen gets in who has literally taken money from Putin uh if she gets in and that would i think be very bad for

1:00:43 united europe so that's what we're dealing with over here oh by the way speaking of the sovereign individual wasn't it uh did you see that reese mogg discussion with tucker carlson i did not i mean i saw it happen i didn't sit down and watch it though yeah i didn't i didn't watch it either just watch some clips but uh he is the son i believe of the author of the sovereign individual is that right yep yeah yeah so uh you don't have a take on that or did you see any of the clips i i didn't i i saw that he was on i don't dive into any of the clips what were they talking about no it's just it was about i mean again this is people can just take a look at the map but this this thing that kind of goes back to again i'm anti-kami anti-nazi like both baltics and poland we were

1:01:30 We're occupied by both. And the fear that we have, especially with this harder right sort of crop that is coming up that I would say Tucker Carlson represents is saying that, oh, well, you know, we should just let Hitler roll over Europe. You know, Czechoslovakia, it's not a real country. The Baltics, not real countries.

1:01:54 You know, Daryl Cooper said, I think somewhat famously now a couple of years ago on Tucker's podcast that like World War Two, the reason it became what it did, you know, is just because of Churchill, this evil villain. You know, it would have just been a small invasion of Poland. but if you actually look at a map uh like all of europe was invaded by the nazis and the soviets together as they were buddies in treaty uh before may of 1940 when churchill came power so just basic historical things like people people saying oh you know just It would have just been an invasion of Poland.

1:02:32 You know, the UK didn't need to do everything. That was what he was arguing with this Reese Mag about. Of course, Reese Mag was taking the normal British position that Churchill was actually fighting, helping to fight a good fight. But yeah, it's like that's that shit just scares us, obviously, on the Eastern front, because I think everybody should get a vote in Europe, including the Poles, including the Baltics.

1:02:58 And that's where we're, you know, I've said it enough on the show, people that know my views, but we're actively being threatened right now, every day. And people got to think about it. Like there's two accounts. I just saw one, this Kirill Dmitrieff. He's the head of the sovereign wealth fund in Russia.

1:03:18 he's uh dim philby which those who follow uh michael weiss is great reporter on russia and middle east uh from the insider he he calls him dim philby this is a reference to kim philby for the old cambridge spy group i mean just an absolute if you're gonna spy for russia you got to be an absolute moron and kim philby wouldn't live the rest of his days in soviet hellscape Russia. But, um, Whitcoff is, has to be like the lowest IQ individual dealing with, you called Putin a humanitarian the other day. I don't know if you saw, um, I mean, it's just, it's, it's incredible stuff. But anyway, uh, Philby and, um, Kushner, right. So they're going over, they're dealing with, with, um, Putin and everything. And these guys are dealing with this, uh, Kirill

1:04:11 Dmitriev as the counter guy, like the direct counterpart. And he is on Twitter posting some AI slop of the US and Russia fighting together against the EU and Britain. And this is just Russian disinformation. I mean, all the while, just so people know, if you're listening to this, Twitter is banned in Russia. Just want people to know that. If you see sock puppet accounts for Russia, pro-Russian stuff. Just know that Twitter is banned in Russia, Facebook, YouTube, they're all banned. So this is the problem with like the, I think the disinformation world space these days is like the hellscape of Russia, the mafia, communist hellscape of Russia, and then the communist Orwellian technocratic, whatever of China, you know, those two states in

1:05:05 particular, they use our platforms, but we can't use theirs, right? Like TikTok famously is a very different experience in China than it is for our lowbrow, low IQ American population, right? So like that is something that people really need to think about. Like, why would it be that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, it's all banned in Russia, but you see, you know, Kiro Dimitriyev or this other guy, his name is Soloviev. He's like the Chief Gables propagandist of Putin. They're on Twitter, out in their propaganda. And yet the platform is banned.

1:05:44 So I would encourage people to understand that if you are liking or retweeting something that just seems so wonderfully sovereign and MAGA and US, but really it's put out by some Russian hellscape. They don't even care if it's right or left. They just want you to fight, right? This goes back to, we always talk about Yuri Bezmanov, wonderful popularizer of the useful idiot.

1:06:06 They don't care. They don't care if you're right or left. They'll fund Jill Stein. They'll fund, you know, Tenet Media. All these guys, Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, the woke righties. The woke righties. It's dangerous. It's dangerous out there. I would just say it's dangerous. Be careful, you know. Yeah. I'm not a lefty commie.

1:06:29 I'll tell you that. but it's I fear I fear them both right now like the hard left hard right and yeah yeah like you see what's going on in Brazil and uh it just feels like stuck in the middle with you situation it's like all right let's just and that's funny because I mean you know this I've had many many people on the show who are um very pro pro Russia it's interesting to get both sides of the perspective, I guess one, I guess neutral comment that I make, I think is what I like to see is like Europe finally realized, like at the end of the day, regardless of what you believe or not on both sides of the argument, I think it'll be a net positive in the future that Europe's saying like, okay, we can't depend on the US, we got to do our own.

1:07:25 Yeah no I mean and that also to be fair although I fine with sort of the Trumpian attitude there but that was already happening after the invasion of Crimea I would again say this is where I think normal Republicans have more to say here It doesn mean you have to fund right I mean, like you haven't, the taxpayer has paid $0 for Ukraine in the last two years.

1:07:53 There's, Europeans have bought systems on behalf of Ukraine from the US, but that's a reimbursement of prior old systems that the US purchased. It's like shrinker act and warehouse. But the taxpayer hasn't paid anything. But the point is, it was already happening. We had already been funding a lot of our defense, you know, that 2%, whatever, NATO threshold, which is way higher than that now, the Baltics, Poland, Finland.

1:08:20 But that stuff was already happening in 2014. But I think where the normal, like Republican, strong defense, strong American values, you know, peace, prosperity, all these things, you have a lot to say there because when did Putin invade Crimea? Who was president then? Obama. When did Putin invade Ukraine for the full scale?

1:08:43 Who was president then? Biden. right it's it's it's it's pretty self-evident in my view it's a weakness of american strength and power it doesn't mean you have to you know go full force we're talking about i'm not talking about invading iraq here right talking about as you know i'm always talking about offensive freedom and liberal values but i think when the u.s has shown weakness is usually where the free world kind of gets screwed so though i take your point and i agree that you know u.s or sorry, EU funding their social welfare programs, you know, since they have a shield of American NATO dominance. Right. And I think the US and Canada or the EU and Canada has arguably done that over the last 30 years in particular.

1:09:31 That really was not the case for the people that were really in danger, like we were always. and in particular from Crimea. Once Crimea occurred in 2014, there was just no turning back. There were a lot of new NATO things that started at that point to work on protecting us and everything. But it's a savage hell statement.

1:09:53 Let me show you a funny one. Have I shown you this one? Hold on. Have I shown you this one? No. Population using safely managed sanitation services. So this is literally if you have a toilet. but I'll just read it because some people, it's from the World Bank. There's a population using an improved sanitation facility that is not shared with other households and where excretors are safely disposed of in situ or treated off site.

1:10:18 Improved sanitation in facilities include flush to piped sewer systems, septic tanks, or pit latrines with a slab, including ventilated pit latrines and compost and toilets. So this is literally if you have a toilet, not the outhouse. all right so na it's you're not no one is you're not making i i've heard like trolls try to say like oh it's a septic tanks septic tanks are in here if you have a septic tank this is an improved sanitation facility there's the u.s you can always improve this started in 2000 96.67 percent now 97 so no matter what the lefty the lefty commies say we actually improve uh for everybody Here's Monaco, just to show you 100% is possible.

1:11:06 All right. Now, here, I showed this to a pro-Israel audience. I just wanted to show this. Israel actually did really well here from 2000 to 2010, past the US. But even, you know, whether you're Jew, Gentile, Arab, here's Jordan. Not as good, but right next to Israel. Started at 70%. Now they're up to 80%.

1:11:26 Here's Ukraine. actually started at 87, passed by Israel, but now at 92%. Okay. I know where I'm going with this, but China, good old China. Let's look here. A lot of this, by the way, reflects moving into cities, but this is pretty wild. This is pretty wild. So China started the century at 13%. Now they're at 68%.

1:11:52 Dang. India started the century at 9%. And now they're at 63%. All right. So whether you're Jew, Gentile, Arab, Hindu, Buddhist, everybody's moving well. Now, you know what I'm about to do here. Last one. Russia, you ready? Yep. Russian Savage Hellscape started at 54%. Currently 58% behind every single country on this chart.

1:12:25 Literally. This is why I literally tell you people, look who's banned on Twitter. They are literally spouting propaganda for a shithole. Sorry to say it, but the country is a savage hellscape shithole. Two in five do not have safely managed sanitation services, according to the WHO. So I don't think Tucker Carlson knows this.

1:12:49 WHO or World Bank Did I say World Bank Sorry WHO WHO Do we trust the WHO That the question Well, I mean, do you think they're specifically singling out Russia? Usually these world bodies cover for Russia. Usually these world bodies cover for Russia. Go in the UN, where Russia has a veto of the Security Council, and see what it says about their savage hellscape invasion of Ukraine.

1:13:30 I think of all of these countries, are going to be fairly accurate equally, or fairly inaccurate equally. I'll say that. Do you think there's any resolution ending to this? We're coming up on, what, five years? Coming up on five years. They're going to keep fighting. You look at the polls, they're going to keep fighting.

1:14:01 They're not asking for Americans to fight. They just won't support. They're going to keep fighting because it's a tyranny. It's a dictatorship. There's no private property. There's no rule of law. so they're going to have to make it too expensive for Putin to tell even his people like yeah I'm just going to keep slaughtering 50,000 of you a month because he's getting close to 50,000 now a month that are getting killed captured or maimed with his invasion it's insane that's the scale that more than half a million a year yeah yeah it's it's hardcore um and again this like you can see i think if you look at this war and you look at actually what happened from the beginning until now first of all it's a completely

1:14:57 different war all right so back then it was traditional war it was even like you know 1914 trench warfare there was the errant shahead that would come in to allied or you know amer and there were Americans helping Canadians, whatever. I mean, not officially, but there were plenty of foreign legion that was helping Ukraine.

1:15:18 But on the Ukrainian side, you would get some errant drones coming in. They were very like inaccurate and not very successful. It's a completely different military theater now. I mean, there's a kill zone of like 50 kilometers or so. basically it is competitive still and ukraine has actually showed that they can retake territory so it's still competitive but what for example but this just shows you it might just be the way of the world and like you know people like to use counterfactuals and stuff but our counterfactual on the, let's say, the hardcore national defense against the savage Russian hell state, right?

1:16:08 This is the Baltics, Poland, Romania, Finland. We would have been, I think, more comfortable at the start of the war five years ago saying, and we were, trying to say like, look, Cran is asking for a no-fly zone. We should just do a no-fly zone. I think that actually would have worked because what it just means is basically you engage.

1:16:29 I mean, if you engage, if there's missiles coming in, if there's drones, which drones were not existent five years ago, really, on the battlefield coming in, but you just engage and you try to save the population from the air. But it does mean that you engage. It does mean pilots would get arrested. And again, I'm not a military guy. I'm not going to try to fight any battles, certainly in terms of, let's say, 2020 hindsight or something. That was basically what was being said from people that thought that NATO was legitimately strong enough to protect Ukrainians here. That didn't happen. We didn't let that happen. All right. So now, five years later, savage Russian health state is still coming, but Ukraine is defending, and now the world

1:17:20 is completely different. So we have this cheaper, cost-effective, just massive drone theater. And now the whole world is having to adapt from that. So I kind of just look at it as like if we had had our way, where like the old world could have stepped up and saved the day, let's say the old free world, like kind of like the US did in Kuwait or something. And I know this hard for a lot of people listening because they think oh you know just us militarizing that's not at all what i'm talking about i'm not you know if you were against bush's invasion of iraq i cannot see how and i don know you mentioned i actually didn know that you had like deliberate pro russian voices i be curious it not really pro It more like pro like the whole geopolitical Well you see Trump

1:18:12 Trump I don't think knew how to solve it either, right? He said he'd solve it in one day. It's been two years. He hasn't solved it. You know, he's got a must to try to cut off the... The more accurate description is amenable to Trump's foreign policy as it relates to Russia. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's all I can tell you there is that's a fool's errand.

1:18:34 Like, there's no way that the Trump family is going to get access to any Russian assets. And there's like any cash flow that's tied to a Russian asset in Russia. And we'll see what happens with this Lukoil deal, because that was one that's been speculated, right? Lukoil's foreign assets. They might try to, or at least people connected to Kushner.

1:18:55 We'll see. Again, if the Biden administration was doing this, by the way, this is blatant, blatant corruption when you're carrying out the national interest of being commander in chief. But let's just put that aside. Let's put that aside. If you are actually trying to do deals with Russia in Russia, you would be completely and utterly fucked.

1:19:17 And you just have to live next to Russia to understand this. I mean, IKEA had a line item for corruption when they were operating in Russia. And they're all gone now. The people that stayed post-invasion, like Dannon, Carlsberg, Nestle, and over the course of five years, they've had all their assets stripped from them. You get nothing.

1:19:38 So you saw that McDonald's left. There's no rule of law in Russia. There's no private property, no rule of law. Every court decision at the end of the day will go to do whatever Putin wants. I mean, he is literally the not the most powerful person in the world, but he's the single most probably consequential richest person in the world.

1:20:00 Like he has the entire Russian economy at his will. You can dress it up any way you like, but it's a two trillion dollar economy that he has at his will. So. So that's where you know, that's where it is. That's how I'm viewing it. And like I said, the old world, which I would have, which all of us would have wanted to see stay at the start of the 2022 full-scale invasion, which would have been like, let's be strong here and stand up to a dictator.

1:20:28 Just like, you know, the Kuwait situation. Then I think we could have done it differently. I think we could have saved a lot of Ukrainian lives. We could have done it differently, but we didn't do it. And so now we're in the new world. and um that's a that's probably a much scarier situation but you know there are glimmers of hope there or let's say more realistic things going back to what you said like i do think that western european countries not relying on u.s uh the u.s security umbrella right or not let's say not funding their social safety nets uh as much because of the u.s security umbrella i would certainly say that's a good thing so again i'm i try to look at this very realistically but

1:21:12 if they're yeah i'm just curious like if if there was someone that really came on your show like a pro-russian stance they would have to they would have to contend with the fact that we can't use any of their platforms and they are literally spouting disinformation. Pro-Russia was a mischaracterization. It's amenable to Trump's foreign policy as it relates to Russia.

1:21:41 Well, and that I think is shown to not be that good. Let me show you this. It was a year ago tweet, and I think it was very informative of what he actually understood. For example, the stuff that I'm saying versus the reality of the situation. So just on the, yeah, so I hear you, first of all, on the Trump foreign policy. Look, it was hard for me, but I did try to give him the benefit of the doubt the first year. But I think this is enlightening. He posted this about a year ago, a little over a year ago, September 2025. We'll just read it. After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine, Russia military and economic situation. And after seeing the economic trouble it is causing Russia,

1:22:26 I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and win all of Ukraine back in its original form. With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe, and in particular NATO, the original borders from where this war started is very much an option. Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years, a war that should have taken a real military power less than a week to win. This is not distinguishing Russia.

1:22:53 In fact, it is very much making them look like a paper tiger. When the people living in Moscow and all of the great cities, towns, and districts all throughout Russia find out what is really going on with this war, the fact that it's almost impossible for them to get gasoline to the long lines that are being formed, and all the other things that are taking place in their war economy, where most of their money is being spent on fighting Ukraine, which has great spirit, and only getting better, Ukraine would be able to take their country in its original form and who knows, maybe even go further than that. Putin and Russia are in big economic trouble. And this is the time for Ukraine to act. In any event, this is the

1:23:30 funniest part. In any event, I wish both countries well. We will continue to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them. Good luck to all. So there's many interesting things about this. First of all, I don't think you and I on this podcast need to go back or go over the absolute, for lack of a better word, neurodivergent 180 flip-flops that Trump makes on his tweets from day to day. I understand we don't have to do that. I also would say, yes, whenever Trump does get a call from Putin, he takes it and he's happy to hear it. He's gotten one recently, which is what the current kerfuffle is about. He got calls from Putin in the early days, and this is where he said, you know, Zelensky's a dictator. Zelensky has a 4% approval rating.

1:24:22 These things that are just literally, you can tell that it came from Putin's mouth. But here in this tweet a year ago, he's, or this truth is truth. He's angry at Putin because Putin has not stopped his war after a year of trying. And so that's true. All of those things are true. So yes, you can say all those things about Trump. But what is, I would say, sad from this side, from the support, like the perspective of Ukraine, and again, this is a year ago, like he gets glimpses of the Ukrainian spirit here, like actually protecting a democracy, fighting for democracy. And you don't even have to do it with American soldiers.

1:25:02 But I think if the American president would come down on the side of Ukraine, like forcefully, fully without remorse or whatever. And of course, we have all this corruption on the side, which is just crazy. And again, like I said, it's never going to work out for them. It's never going to work out that they will get any cash flow producing assets into the Trump family without massive heartache and or gulag death situations. But if you go back to the traditional Republican strong defense standpoint, I think that would have helped Ukraine much more and much quicker than this. So I think this is just enlightening, let's say, of where Trump's positions have not really been, at the very least, they have not been straightforward, right? And you can see a

1:25:54 year later, he's now gone back to the other thing where he's gotten a call from Putin recently, and he thinks that he can actually squeeze the Ukrainians out. And the Starlink, Star Shield, thing is just one of like a million things that's been happening where they think that they can, you know, squeeze the Ukrainian people. There'll be a lot of interesting things. Look, I follow this conflict very close. And I know that this might not be enlightening for, well, hopefully it's enlightening, but it might not be as interesting for some people.

1:26:22 But I can tell you, it will probably come out. This is my view. I haven't seen this quoted or anything, but this former defense minister of Ukraine, his name is Mikhailo Fedorov, he did a really good job with Musk at the start of the year. And he got Musk onto his side to get the Russians, because the Russians were like spoofing and using Starlink when technically they shouldn't have. And so Musk actually finally got on fully board with Ukraine at the start of the year and blocked Russians from basically using that on the actual front contact line.

1:26:56 and that was a huge thing that he did and he gained a lot of uh a lot of stock a lot of currency with the ukrainian people at the start of the year and then there was a real politic things that happened in ukraine over the summer very unfortunate whatever the head of the general staff was fired and and then zelensky also fired fedorov as well which people were saying oh this is just real politic all the all the stuff and it's true it was but then and there were protests actually to bring Fedorov back on as a defense minister. All those protests, though, dissolved in August because, and this is me talking, I don't know this for sure, but I bet you it's going to come out. Basically, he is kind of a tech, he's a tech guy, like he was helping them a lot.

1:27:43 But he made this statement that like said, we just have to, you know, start elections again, because this is the Trump line. And we can't let Russia postpone our elections, which this has already been voted on by the Ukrainian parliament They cannot do elections in wartime It under martial law right now the country And the fact that he said that in my view clearly shows he keeping up pretty close ties with Musk. And Musk really wanted to put Fedorov in. And it shows you how powerful someone like Musk is and how much this real politic is going on, even in the war here. And the protests just dissolve for him overnight. And so that was like a sad thing because the guy was doing really well as young or thinking he was trying to root out, uh, you know, corruption and things like that.

1:28:33 And he was really trying to do a good job. But at the end of the day, must try to install him basically. And you like, you could basically read that through the tea leaves and then all the protests just dissolved because they're not, no matter what anybody says, they're not going to try to put elections on during wartime. So that's just a little bit of, That's my view, my reading, but I imagine that's going to come out at some point that he was basically trying to get on side of like Musk and or Trump.

1:29:03 And they're not, you know, they. That the Ukrainian people are able to actually see through that. They're not going to have elections just because, you know, Elon Musk wants them to have it or something. So they're going to do everything they can to fight off the savage hell state. And that's what the Constitution says.

1:29:27 That's what they have to do. Holding elections right now would be just incredibly dangerous. I mean, Ukrainians are dying every night, every night. And they're going to go through a huge battle this winter. It's just going to be a, you know, if there was any time, ever a time for the free world to enact a no-fly zone, it would be this winter.

1:29:47 because Russia's last winter was like going after, you know, all the electric substations this winter, it's going to be going after. They've already, it's already been leaked. Like what the, and they've already showed what they want to do. Like they would just want to completely bomb and destroy Kiev because this is all that Russia knows how to do when it wins wars.

1:30:04 Like this is how they want in Chechnya. You know, this is what they do. It's what they tried to do in Afghanistan. This was tried to do in a world war two. Like they just, they just come at you and um ukrainian people are literally fighting for it not on their own but with uh you know with no no financial support from from the u.s which is uh you know it is what it is but they're they're going to be really tested this winter so anyway just wanted to show up I just wanted to share a few of those things because that's basically what's been going on in my view.

1:30:46 And it's going to be tough for him. Yeah. I mean, as I've been saying for almost five years now, I hope, maybe it's weak here. But yeah, like you, I'm very anti-war and would like to see a resolution to this at some point soon. same similarly with Iran. Because I think there's a ton of potential to do good right now, considering everything that's happening in the world of tech and productivity.

1:31:17 And we have the potential for a golden age globally, if we'll take it. But real politics gets in the way a lot of times, unfortunately. It does. But I think the World War II analogy is probably most apt right now. you know, that there is no elected government in Russia and they're not going to, you know, Putin's just going to do whatever he can and he's not going to, you know, democracies actually would be more prone to stopping the war. As we know, democracies like to extend wars with the printing press, right? But they're still more prone to stopping the war due to blood and treasure being lost and families speaking out, right? Even though it could take a long time, as we saw in the history of the US and Afghanistan, right? But in Russia, they don't have that. Putin doesn't have

1:32:16 that escape valve. And so what is actually in his interest is to not stop the war, because if he does stop the war and he shows, look, I'm such a shithole leader of a shithole country, we have literally taken you know they just to just to talk about the percentages at the beginning of the war they got up to 30 of the country All right And then they had to retreat because Ukraine kicked them out of Kiev And now they under 20 like 19 And they losing ground every month. So it's less likely for a dictator to stop war because if he stops and he says, look at me, I'm such a shithole leader. You guys don't have toilets. Your GDP per capita is 15,000. The US is 90,000, by the way. We've closed off. We've closed you off to the free

1:33:05 world. You can't travel. There's sanctions, all this. Look at me, look at me, look at me. Obviously, he's not going to do that. Because if he does do that, and Russia has a very strong history of this, he would probably just be a dead man. And he's not going to do that. I mean, he's prepared for revolts, like the secret police in Russia. There's probably a million.

1:33:28 I've heard figures of a million people that are paid well fed well and are ready to protect the Putin institution so that's what we have to deal with but if it was a democracy they would be more likely to stop war not less I'm going to run here in five minutes I did want to end it on a Bitcoin thing no it was good we haven't done that in like a year I'm happy for a deep dive on that.

1:33:58 And I think it's important. As I've said every time that we've... I'm glad to get on and give a different perspective because I'm well aware of the audience that I speak to. But it is what it is. But you mentioned Bitcoin getting integrated in the banking system. And when that happened. I've kept it in the back of my mind to bring up because I do think it's an interesting, underappreciated data point that I've been seeing on the back end, just talking to companies involved in this area of the market, which is Bitcoin collateralized lending and the cost of capital and the amount of capital that is opening up to these Bitcoin collateralized lending desks.

1:34:45 Yeah. The amount of capital is going up dramatically, lines of credit being issued, and then cost going down. I think you're seeing credit funds, some banks, obscure banks, I think, being willing to lend against Bitcoin at 6%, 7% to these lending desks. Then obviously they're putting some margin on top of that.

1:35:10 But I think the base cost of capital for Bitcoin collateralized loans is falling. And so if you're looking for a fundamental indicator and data point that things are going in the right direction for Bitcoin, And I think that's one of actually the most important that most people don't have any insight to that.

1:35:28 It does seem to be trending in the right direction. Are you seeing that six, seven percent from banks or like non-bank lenders? I think non-bank lenders particularly. But and that's via competitive forces of other non-bank lenders coming in with more capital. And so. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's great.

1:35:47 And by the way, that could be the answer to, I've posed this question a lot, but the power versus exponential question, right? And again, brass tacks, I just mentioned it earlier during our projection of what could happen in the 2030s. But 80 to 100 trillion, that's what the power curve projects by the late 2030s, 2040, let's say for Bitcoin.

1:36:11 that could be about the level where this, which is the monetary base, which we've been talking about a long time, which is only about 26 trillion at the moment. But if it goes on the same trend that it's always been on, which is not that fast, actually, it's only 8% roughly weighted since Bitcoin's been around, that will get you to 100 trillion by 2040 as well.

1:36:34 So that could be a point where they meet. Now, again, just because it's a big round number doesn't mean that Anything has to happen at that point. But I do think, unfortunately, it's more likely than not that Bitcoin gets pulled into the exponential trend of the financial system than Bitcoin pulling the rest of the financial system into a power trend. And precisely what you just said, interest rates becoming more competitive to borrow against Bitcoin, people just sort of using their Bitcoin as a facility to draw liquidity and do other things with their life, which is fine.

1:37:11 But those are all exponential endeavors right Compound growth It just how it works And so if you do get enough fiat units levered against Bitcoin one would presume that that could pull Bitcoin price back into an exponential trend. And by the way, if it goes into an exponential trend, Bitcoin, as opposed to a power trend, which it is right now at 40% per growth, a power trend slowly falls, right? So it's 40% trend in 12-month growth right now. All right. So again, it's a pretty good bet.

1:37:43 This is the sailor bet, right? He pays 10%. If you could pay 6%, whatever. And the Bitcoin power trend is 40%, a little bit under and falling. You still got plenty of coverage for your collateral before you might have to look for other places to service that cashflow of that debt. But if enough people start to do that, and the Bitcoin just becomes another financialized asset like gold or silver or whatever, stocks, bonds, then yeah, Bitcoin will turn into an exponential asset. And that will break Bitcoin to the upside, not to the downside. I think we are at risk of everybody not being as happy. Maybe the project will fail. Maybe it'd be too centralized. Maybe that's a KYC world. I don't know. That's a lot of questions that are out and we don't have much

1:38:26 time. But yeah, that's where we're going. And by the way, I still don't think we're anywhere near that, even though, like you said, it's happening. Because here, you just look at the raw numbers. This is the broad and base money picture. So the base money is most... Now, there's a Bitcoin, 26 trillion broad money i have at 158 trillion and that's less precise number but it's that's not even including euro dollars there's probably one or two other big countries i could get that would maybe make that a little bit larger uh note by the way that ratio all right so this is like the money multiplier ratio it's climbing again and um that also could portend another risk in markets because the ratio used to be around 10, which makes sense, kind of like the traditional

1:39:11 fraction reserve banking 10 to 1 ratio. With all the liquidity that they printed post 2008, this thing got down to 4.1 in 2021. And now it's back up to 6, which is the level we haven't seen since 2011. Now, again, I don't know what this could mean. There's no way to tell when this is going to push another crisis or anything, but it's just to show you tens of trillions of dollars as base money, hundreds of trillions of dollars as broad money, repurchase agreements, money market funds, all that stuff. Stable coins are dropping the bucket of this. So there's a long way to go still for Bitcoin to be sizable, to penetrate these markets. So I still think, just another reason why I still think, if you want to sort of relax, don't think about war as much as I do.

1:40:06 Hopefully you don't have to. The power curve and looking at the percentile quantiles of the power curve, as we're very, very cheap right now, that could be a better way to put a touch grass and live your life because it's a pretty strong indicator of where Bitcoin has been, I think, and where it's going.

1:40:26 You heard it here first. Look at the charts, touch grass. Log off of X every once in a while. Matty, it's always a pleasure, sir. Likewise, my friend. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to my digressions there. And I appreciate chatting with you every quarter. We're going to win. We're going to win.

1:40:48 Yes, we will. Yes, we will. Freedom of democracy. Anti-Commie, anti-Nazi. we're going to win. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there.

1:41:10 Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app.

1:41:31 You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month, get you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time. Okay. Thank you.